Operation Oryx: the Three Stages of Captive Breeding by Ian
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110 Operation Oryx: the Three Stages of Captive Breeding By Ian. R. Grimwood In 1961 the Arabian oryx was in such danger that the only hope for its survival seemed to lie in capturing sufficient animals to start a breeding herd in captivity from which eventually some could be returned to the wild. The Fauna Preservation Society, aided by the World Wildlife Fund, organised Operation Oryx, and under the leadership of Major Grimwood, then Chief Game Warden in Kenya, three animals were captured. These, together with some from the very few in captivity, were sent to Phoenix Zoo in Arizona for stage two of the operation, the breeding of a stock, which is now going on successfully. Stage three, the return to the wild, still lies ahead. Describing the capture expedition, Major Grimwood emphasises the immense interest it aroused, which brought help from six governments, five zoos, scores of societies and clubs, hundreds of individuals, and several oil and other companies, including an electricity company in Kenya which emptied its showroom of ovens in order to heat the oryx's quarantine quarters to save them from the cold. npHBRE are many possible approaches to the saving of an en- •"• dangered animal species threatened with extinction. Undoubtedly the best chance of success is to create an effective reserve around a surviving population in the wild. Where that is not possible alternative solutions may be to transfer a population to a reserve within the former range of the species, or even to one outside its natural range where similar ecological conditions exist, as is being done in the case of the aye-aye in Madagascar; or it may be impossible to do more than control the hunting or capturing of the animal concerned. In these cases a simultaneous captive breeding programme may prove to be a valuable insurance against failure. Nevertheless, the risks and difficulties involved are usually so great, not only in the capturing and handling of an animal whose reaction to shock and stress may be quite unknown, but also in producing artificial conditions which will induce it to breed freely in captivity, that the occasions which justify putting all our eggs in the captive breeding basket will be very few. In 1961, however, the Arabian oryx, Oryx leucoryx, presented just such a case, and the purpose of this paper is to describe the steps taken in the initial stage of the captive breeding programme, that of getting together a breeding nucleus, and to outline some of the difficulties still to be overcome in the second and third stages, those of building up a numerous and healthy population in captivity and the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 29 Sep 2021 at 15:41:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003060530000613X Operation Oryx 111 eventual re-introduction of the species into the wild, without which no such programme can be considered a success. Effect of the Motor Car The Arabian oryx was formerly plentiful in suitable localities throughout the Arabian peninsula, from Sinai and the Syrian desert in the north to the Arabian sea in the south. Because of its extreme wariness and the great distances it is able to travel—individuals may wander as much as 50 to 60 miles a day in their normal search for food—the species was able to withstand the steady hunting of poorly armed Bedouin operating on foot or with camels, and so difficult was it to kill an oryx under those conditions that it became a distinction to be a successful oryx hunter, even though a man might kill no more than one or two in his whole lifetime. Unfortunately, the dis- tinction persisted after the motor car had removed all the difficulties, making it possible to kill a dozen animals in a day by running them down and slaughtering them as they stood exhausted and helpless. As a result, the species rapidly disappeared from most of its range, exterminated by the rich car-owning class of Arab rather than the Bedouin, although the European employees of oil companies were not guiltless. By 1960 it was thought still to exist only in one area, along the southern, and possibly the eastern edges of the Rub-al-Khali, the great sea of sand dunes in the south-east corner of the Arabian peninsula. Nothing was known about the eastern part of this region, which lies in the sultanate of Muscat and Oman, other than that Bedouin, coming from Mugshin and Jiddat-al-Harrasis, reported occasionally seeing oryx there. In the western part, which lies in the eastern Aden Protectorate, small parties of from five to ten animals each, totalling perhaps 80 to 100 in all, were in the habit of coming out from the safety of the sand sea each summer, when heat made life insupportable amongst the dunes, and scattering over the gravel plains to the south. The Spur to Action Early in 1961, that region was raided by a motorised hunting party from Qatar, over 500 miles to the north, which killed at least 48 oryx—approximately half the known population of the species. For this party to have crossed the Rub-al-Khali was a remarkable feat in itself, but having done so once it could obviously do it again. The Fauna Preservation Society, in conjunction with the Survival Service Commission of IUCN, realising that immediate action was necessary, decided to send an expedition to capture a breeding nucleus while some animals still survived. I, who was then Chief Game Warden of Kenya, was asked to take charge of the operation in the field. We planned our attempt for the following April or May, at which time of year we thought the oryx would be sure to have come out of the dunes on to the plains where they could be caught, but when temperatures should not be so high as to endanger them during capture. In February, however, we received news that the raiders Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 29 Sep 2021 at 15:41:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003060530000613X 112 Oryx had returned, and they were reported to have killed all the surviving oryx. Despite this blow to its hopes, the Fauna Preservation Society decided that the expedition should continue as planned, in the hope that some animals had survived the hunters. So in March we moved to Mukalla, and a month later reached Sanau, the last outpost of the Hadhrami Bedouin Legion and the nearest water to the area in which we were to operate. The Hunt in the Desert The region where oryx might be found was a rough quadrilateral of some 8000 square miles of sand and gravel plains with its northern side running for 100 miles along the edge of the sand sea. Although tracks of the ten vehicles used by the raiders were to be seen every- where, we could at first find no recent signs of oryx. After a week, however, we came across the spoor of one animal, and having followed it for two days sighted and caught our first oryx. By the time the expedition was over and we had explored the whole area thoroughly, we came to the conclusion that no more than eleven animals had survived the raid, of which five had left the area before our arrival and travelled so far east into the neighbouring state of Oman that it was politically impossible for us to follow them. Four others, three males and one female, we tracked down and caught, killing one of the males in the process, while the other two, which we never saw, alarmed either by our spotter aircraft or the vehicles, escaped into the sand sea, where we could not go, and from which they did not emerge again while we were in the area. The surviving two males and one female of the four we caught were flown to Kenya, from where, after being held for a period of some months in specially prepared quarters at Isiolo, in the northern sub-desert zone, they were flown to Clifton quarantine station at New York, and finally on to the Arizona Zoological Society's zoo at Phoenix. On the way they were joined in London by a young female from the London Zoo, which the London Zoological Society had put into the common pool. The Hunt in the Zoos The two pairs thus completed could by no means be considered a viable breeding nucleus, and we of the field party were very conscious of our failure to realise the hopes of the Society, so an intensive search started for other oryx already in captivity which might be added to the "world herd" as it had begun to be called. All animals reported to be held by various zoos turned out to belong to other species, however, or to be hybrids like the scimitar-horned oryx-addax, crosses in the Rome Zoo, and it became apparent that the female from the London Zoo had been the only Arabian oryx in captivity, either in Europe or America. (The London Zoo also possessed a male, but it was semi-crippled and unfit for breeding purposes.) However, two animals of unknown sex and in pretty poor condition were located wandering, apparently ownerless, in the suks of Taiz, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.